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So the long wait for BAI’s Sound & Vision Radio Radio 10 is over and thankfully one of our submissions ‘Roddy’s Fighting Words’ has received funding and gets the green light. Fight Words is an inspiring creative writing initiative launched by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love and based near Croke Park in Dublin’s inner city. We’ve been volunteering for some time and have got to know the story behind the place so we’re delighted to get the chance to craft a creative radio documentary telling the tale behind the centre and and the ideas that fuel it. The final documentary will be broadcast by RTÉ Lyric fm and is likely to air in Autumn 2011.
We’ve mid way through our current Sound & Vision radio commission for Lyric fm. Its a one year project called ‘An Opera for Carlow’ and we’re on episode 5 of the monthly broadcasts into In Tempo, the morning show. Its a community based arts project led by conductor Fergus Shiel and it will culminate in a performance next May in Visual, the new arts centre and theatre in Carlow. Our project will end in a one hour documentary tracking the story of the opera and its performance, including the local singers and performers who have come to star in it. Our new production assistant, Lisa Essuman, is passionate about radio and she will be working on ‘An Opera for Carlow’ and has already been recording rehearsals and interviews for the next episodes. You can listen to podcasts of the series on www.podcastingireland.ie our podcasting portal.
We’ve also just finished a major project for UCD and its online archive, the IVRLA. Last winter we launched www.joycesdublin.ie an audio podcast and microsite for IVRLA and we’ve now created a video showreel and videocasts around the digital online library and resource. We filmed in UCD and used the green screen facilities at De Studio in Clonskeagh and Barry MacNeill, our videographer, has edited the pieces in in our in-house edit suite using Final Cut Pro. Its a beautiful project and we’ll add the videos online when we can. The IVRLA launches on November 10th and our showreel will be online along with the videocasts.
In other radio work we’ve just finished a 13 part series, presented and produced by the wonderful Ella MacSweeney, for Today with Pat Kenny. This was part of the first round of independent radio commissions by RTÉ Radio and we hope we get the opportunity to do more project with Ella and develop the ‘Home Grown’ brand futher. The radio series has its own Facebook page and it continues to provide a resource on the material presented during the show. Check it out and befriend ‘Home Grown’.
Athena Media can be followed via twitter @athenamedia.ie and we’d love to hear from you and what you think about our work.

We’re in the final stages of our documentary project Pat Falvey: My Private Everest which is due for broadcast on Setanta Sports. Its a BAI Sound and Vision supported project and we’ve been working on it for one full year. In fact the paper work on it began two years ago! We started filming in late October 2009 and we followed Pat Falvey’s life and journey across his the year finishing filming in late July. Since then we’ve been busy with trying to locate images, archives and work out the paper edit as well as sort details like music. We’ve been blessed with the music in that a few years ago via our music channel Making Waves (which was an online music podcast for three years from 2006-09) we came across a great Limerick band Seneca. The music stayed with us and in the Autumn I contacted Darragh and Rob from the band and they very kindly agreed to make instrumental tracks of their music from their album. Its truly wonderful music - we’re using about seven tracks in the documentary and it is a joy to work with and cut pictures with and we can’t recommend the band or the music enough. The other break for us in this documentary has been the amazing archive from Falvey himself. This is a biography of the Cork born adventurer’s life story - his journey from his humble roots in the north side of Cork, his teenage dream of being a millionaire and how he achieved that goal by his 21 birthday. He built a property empire which grew and expanded across the 80s but by 1987 the then recession had hit and he lost it all. He turned to mountains as a solace and by 34 was on the top of Everest. Its an amazing life story which stretches across the globe and has literally half a dozen highs and lows. Falvey is just back from base camp Everest where he took a group of Irish TV ‘celebs’ there to raise funds for HOPE.
We’ll let you know when it is going out - hopefully before too long. In the meantime we’re up for a multimedia award for Joyce’s Dublin on November 18th, which is quite a thing and we’re just about to finish our latest project for UCD and its online archive library, the IVRLA, which launches on Nov 10th.